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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness Is Pure Fanfic
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Angela Watercutter

Culture
May 6, 2022 7:00 AM


DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS IS PURE FANFIC

And that’s (mostly) a good thing.
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Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness hits theaters Friday. Courtesy of
Marvel Studios

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One scene in Marvel’s latest offering, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of
Madness, will surely dominate the conversation about the movie for weeks. If
you’ve seen the trailer you already know it. It’s the moment where Karl Mordo
(Chiwetel Ejiofor) approaches Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and says,
“The Illuminati will see you now.” This isn’t the Illuminati of lore, the secret
organization often spoken of as society’s puppeteers. This is Marvel’s
Illuminati, a group of heroes in a different reality than the one audiences have
seen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe thus far, and it consists of lots of
cameos we won’t spoil here.

Marvel fans have seen versions of this moment many times. It’s the kind of
moment either meant to set up 100 more films and shows or to remind you just how
much intellectual property Disney owns. Or both. It’s a narrative tool meant to
illustrate superheroes coming together to save the universe (of course), but the
scene is also a chance to tease, say, the next big reboot or wink at the Disney+
show What if … ? Put another way, it’s fanfic made real. (OK, if you’re
spoiler-averse, maybe stop reading now.)

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None of this would be possible without the multiverse. As WIRED pointed out last
year, WandaVision kicked open the door to multiple realities in a way that meant
not only could one Doctor Strange movie have multiple Doctor Stranges but also
the Wanda from WandaVision (Elizabeth Olsen) could try to skip to a timeline
where she joins children she never birthed in the main MCU timeline and also
pass through one with a very prominent X-Man, who comes from a universe where
Magneto is maybe her father. (Whew!) A lot of this, like Strange’s appearance in
Spider-Man: No Way Home, is the result of Disney now owning more of Marvel’s
toys than it did two decades ago, having acquired Fox (previous parent of the
Fantastic Four and the X-Men) in 2019 and cutting a deal to have Sony’s Spidey
movies align with the larger Marvel movie world.



Fans dream of this stuff. Who doesn’t want Professor Charles Xavier to come in
with some moral authority? Everyone wonders who would win if Captain Marvel and
Scarlet Witch got into a scrap. (A not insignificant subset would also probably
suggest they kiss and make up, but that’s more slashfic.) Now that Disney has
all these franchises under its spell, they intend to use them. Marvel honcho
Kevin Feige has promised as much. Doctor Strange meeting the Illuminati is just
the beginning.

But that’s not the only way Multiverse of Madness feels like fanfic. It’s also
the stylistic choices. Directed by Sam Raimi, the mastermind behind the 1981
horror classic The Evil Dead who went on to direct the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man
movies, Madness is easily the most horror-filled of the Marvel films. So it’s a
genre mashup, too. (For Dead fans, it also has one helluva cameo.) Add in a
Danny Elfman score that moves delightfully close to Trent Reznor’s territory and
it all feels like, well, watching a Marvel movie in another universe. This is
the point, of course, and it definitely makes Madness fun in a way that, say,
Eternals wasn’t. But it can have a bit of a kitchen-sink feeling. (Perhaps the
tired tropes Wanda nearly falls into could also be in this mix, but that's
another story.) 



For a while now, fans have lived in a world with many separate multiverses—they
could keep Iron Man and discard the X-Men, and write their own story if they
wanted them to meet—crossing them over looks super cool, but it may not come
without consequences.

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My former colleague Adam Rogers predicted this last year, in that aforementioned
WandaVision piece, referring to it as a metacrisis. “Crossovers and by extension
multiverses solve storytelling problems specific to big shared stories,” he
wrote. But if you’re a comics editor or a showrunner or a movie producer,
eventually there comes a time when “you burn it all in a cosmic fire—the
metacrisis, where a destructive act destroys a super-shared multiverse, clears
away the debris, and readies the narrative field for planting again.” This has
already been teased with Loki’s season-finale reveal of He Who Remains. This
fire, though, will take a lot of beloved storylines with it. It will be
necessary; it will be a mess. And it will be up to fans if they want to continue
on in this fiction.



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Angela Watercutter is a senior editor at WIRED covering pop culture. She also
serves as the publication's deputy bureau chief in New York. Prior to joining
WIRED she was a reporter for the Associated Press. Watercutter was also a senior
editor of Longshot magazine and a contributor to Pop-Up Magazine.... Read more
Senior Editor
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